One month,
Today the Travel blog is one month old...and doing just fine. we are at over 200 page views, and like I said yesterday we are getting hits from search engines, new friends are adding us their blog rolls and we are getting "fans" from all over the world.
Yesterday I discovered a girl in Japan had plagiarized my latest entry. She copied and pasted it into a travel forum she posts to. I've had sites use my work on Associated Content without authorization before, so I check up on my work through Google alerts and engines that can my work and try to find it other places on the net. I know I'm not a world famous blogger, or making my whole living off of this, but I need to do my best to protect my work. This was a mixed bag. Yes I was flattered that she liked my post enough to want to share it, but she didn't credit me for it. The travel blog is not generating revenue as of yet ( but I think we might be headed that way soon) so it wasn't like money was on the line or anything like that. I just wanted credit where it was due. I contacted the girl and the admin for the forum. The three of us decided she would include a link back and list me as the creator. Since she has done that her forum post has sent 9 people to my blog. In the end, it has been win/win.
Here's the deal, if she were making money off my work, I would have made her take it down until we could hammer out an agreement for payment. If she wanted to buy non-exclusive rights, or pay me a portion of the page view revenue. She isn't making money, so just giving me my credit was enough.
One of my goals is to pick up writing clients. In those cases if a client wants to sign a contract and purchase the right to publish my work, or to have me create content, that would be awesome. I've been busy launching this new travel blog and writing articles for ehow (for the revenue) this summer, but that is only the beginning. This blog has had quite the little face lift over the past month, and I'm not done yet. There will be more content, rate and contract samples, and other goodies to come. There is a chance this whole production will be be moving to wordpress, but that is still just a idea. My current issue is I am using the free version of wordpress right now. That means i cannot have ads, and I'm not even sure if I had a paid account I could use adsense. With blogger, I can use adsense, but let's be honest here: It isn't like I am making tons of money with adsense. Making money is contingent on readers click on ads...ads that most likely just annoy them. so the question is, do I dump blogger and go to wordpress and just suck up that $2.00 a month (average) until I am ready to upgrade and add ads to my blogs? Or should I hold out a little longer? I have a few options, but I'm not sold on one yet.
The summer has just begun, and already I am seeing some awesome growth. It has taken a while to get this little freelance writing company up and running. However, it is all starting to pay off.
In the works:
Ehow:
How to not look like a tourist
How to deal with dyslexia at work
How to find a budget hotel in San Francisco
Travel Blog:
Expedia Break Down
Planning Ahead: Halloween 2008 (it will make sense later I promise)
More Budget Travel Secrets
Put-in-Bay basics
Is budget travel even still possible
CTA Tutorial
Plus features on Amtrak, Mega Bus, other funness along the way.
Press Releases:
Books on Amazon
The Travel Blog
One for our services here.
Press Kits?
Yeah that is my plan. I am hoping to have enough to put together a press kit by Labor Day. I'm thinking of taking a revamped version of my online portfolio (I'm currently making some changes to that...the new and improved model should be posted here soon) that would be available here online and in hard copy format. I'm sort of loving Google Documents and the patch for Word 2007 that lets you save documents as PDFs. Both items should make my life much easier. I have something that will work in the interim, so I'm not totally unprepared in case I have a potential client, but I'm hoping the new materials will just give it an extra bump.
Yesterday I discovered a girl in Japan had plagiarized my latest entry. She copied and pasted it into a travel forum she posts to. I've had sites use my work on Associated Content without authorization before, so I check up on my work through Google alerts and engines that can my work and try to find it other places on the net. I know I'm not a world famous blogger, or making my whole living off of this, but I need to do my best to protect my work. This was a mixed bag. Yes I was flattered that she liked my post enough to want to share it, but she didn't credit me for it. The travel blog is not generating revenue as of yet ( but I think we might be headed that way soon) so it wasn't like money was on the line or anything like that. I just wanted credit where it was due. I contacted the girl and the admin for the forum. The three of us decided she would include a link back and list me as the creator. Since she has done that her forum post has sent 9 people to my blog. In the end, it has been win/win.
Here's the deal, if she were making money off my work, I would have made her take it down until we could hammer out an agreement for payment. If she wanted to buy non-exclusive rights, or pay me a portion of the page view revenue. She isn't making money, so just giving me my credit was enough.
One of my goals is to pick up writing clients. In those cases if a client wants to sign a contract and purchase the right to publish my work, or to have me create content, that would be awesome. I've been busy launching this new travel blog and writing articles for ehow (for the revenue) this summer, but that is only the beginning. This blog has had quite the little face lift over the past month, and I'm not done yet. There will be more content, rate and contract samples, and other goodies to come. There is a chance this whole production will be be moving to wordpress, but that is still just a idea. My current issue is I am using the free version of wordpress right now. That means i cannot have ads, and I'm not even sure if I had a paid account I could use adsense. With blogger, I can use adsense, but let's be honest here: It isn't like I am making tons of money with adsense. Making money is contingent on readers click on ads...ads that most likely just annoy them. so the question is, do I dump blogger and go to wordpress and just suck up that $2.00 a month (average) until I am ready to upgrade and add ads to my blogs? Or should I hold out a little longer? I have a few options, but I'm not sold on one yet.
The summer has just begun, and already I am seeing some awesome growth. It has taken a while to get this little freelance writing company up and running. However, it is all starting to pay off.
In the works:
Ehow:
How to not look like a tourist
How to deal with dyslexia at work
How to find a budget hotel in San Francisco
Travel Blog:
Expedia Break Down
Planning Ahead: Halloween 2008 (it will make sense later I promise)
More Budget Travel Secrets
Put-in-Bay basics
Is budget travel even still possible
CTA Tutorial
Plus features on Amtrak, Mega Bus, other funness along the way.
Press Releases:
Books on Amazon
The Travel Blog
One for our services here.
Press Kits?
Yeah that is my plan. I am hoping to have enough to put together a press kit by Labor Day. I'm thinking of taking a revamped version of my online portfolio (I'm currently making some changes to that...the new and improved model should be posted here soon) that would be available here online and in hard copy format. I'm sort of loving Google Documents and the patch for Word 2007 that lets you save documents as PDFs. Both items should make my life much easier. I have something that will work in the interim, so I'm not totally unprepared in case I have a potential client, but I'm hoping the new materials will just give it an extra bump.
Comments